Founder and CEO of Perbi Cubs, Anyele Perbi has expressed deep concern regarding the state of the reading culture, particularly within the African context. Speaking on the Titans and Trailblazers Show she highlighted the alarming statistics and emphasized the critical role reading plays in overall development and future prospects.
According to the World Bank in 2022, 89 percent of children in Sub Saharan Africa cannot read and understand a simple story by the age of 10, a trend she describes as very serious. “Reading is foundational to all other learning in school, so when you cannot read by the age of ten , and even if you are smart as you are severely limited in what you can grow up to be and so that is the state of literacy in our continent”.
Mrs Anyele who is also an Economist noted that there are several root causes to this literacy gap such as “not having adequate access to reading materials, very large class sizes when children are supposed to learning to read and they are in class of about 60, it affects you and then the pervasive one been a general lack of appreciation of reading in our culture, so reading is considered a chore, a bore, a necessary evil”.
She explained that when a child is not reading fluently and they are not encouraged they buy the story that they are not smart enough adding that it becomes a vicious cycle where they don’t put in enough effort , they avoid reading and then they are not reading enough. “The problem is worse now because we have alternatives, social media is quite engaging, there are alot of videos , you hardly need to read ,you just keep scrolling, keep watching and so a lot of people are not growing up where they have to read something to learn information and so that becomes an issue” she emphasized.
The CEO of Perbi Cubs explained that her institution is an ed-tech facility that offers a fun evidence based cost effective literacy program,that empowers especially children to succeed by becoming proficient readers. “What we offer is a platform to get children better at reading. When it comes to where we are as Ghana just like the rest of the world we are enamored with all these wonderful tools we have such as AI, robotics,coding and stem and we want our children to have access to all of these things”.
Talking about some success stories chalked by Perbi Cub, Madam Anyele explained that through her institution more children across the country have been engaged to read close to one thousand books through their online programmes. She said, ” the fact that we have been able to give children who are in otherwise remote communities as far as Navrongo, as far as Wa, as far as Tarkwa access to the same books that children across the world have been able to access and therefore empower them to think critically, empower them to communicate effectively, empower them to be self confident and to approach school with a different attitude, those are our success stories.
She explained that Perbi Cub has currently impacted about 20 thousand children across the country adding that “our goal in the next three years is to scale to get one million active readers across Ghana and also other parts of Africa and after tackle the literacy problem head on. We would love to change the statistics from 9 out of 10 not been able to read and understand a simple story to 9 out of 10 can read and understand a simple story by the age of 10 and that is our goal at Perbi Cub”.
Perbi Cubs was founded by a family in Montreal who noticed a gap in library services during a visit to Ghana. Initially a family affair where they borrowed many books, the initiative expanded to become Perbi Cubs Library Services, a literacy-promoting endeavor to combat declining reading levels and foster a love for reading among children in Africa. Today, Perbi Cubs is an ed-tech company that provides literacy programs, digital resources like eBooks, and school reading competitions, aiming to build a culture of leisure reading among children of African descent.
Source: Forshes News
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